Rake. - The Guys Who Chose the "Wrong Music"

“We certainly don't make music to win friends. We chose the 'wrong music'”

(Vincent Van Go-Gogh)

Little-known creators of some of the most "disturbing" and adventurous music of their time, Rake. belong to the most experimental fringe of the rock universe. Blending psychedelia, noise, industrial music, free-jazz, kosmische, tape-music and avant-garde tout court, the American band demonstrated, above all on their absolute masterpiece The Art Ensemble Of Rake/The Tell-Tale Moog, just how prodigious a creative force rock can be when, combined with an irreverent dadaist attitude, it plunges into the murky waters of collective improvisation.

It all began in 1988. In Fairfax, in the Virginia county of the same name, bassist Bill Kellum (noms de guerre: Rex, SKB) and guitarist/clarinetist Jim Ayre (registered in the annals of the underground under the names Vincent Van Go-Gogh, VvGg, Vinnie Van Go-Go, OASTEM! Jim, or simply V) met in high school and started having fun with "jagged cosmic-guitar sounds". They also recorded a cassette, "50 Ways To Leave The Planet", of which no trace remains. It probably never even existed. Or maybe it was simply shot into space in search of intelligent life forms. Although still young lads eager not to miss out on life's pleasures (chief among them "video games, cheap beer and weed"), the two already had very clear ideas: "We wanted to record records we couldn't have heard anywhere else," Vincent recalls. "Labels like ESP and ReRecords had built a sonic world that pushed us to look beyond the boundaries of rock. Not that there was anything wrong with rock - we still had our guilty pleasures! (Bill, for instance, also played in a few heavy metal cover bands) - but we set out a plan to dismantle the rules. We had a very free-jazz attitude, and much of the noise and fury of our early records came from the urge to improvise, to 'get wasted'. Playing loud and anarchically was, for us, a genuine strategy, our own way of reproducing the energy of free-jazz with the tools of rock. We often pulled it off; other times, though, we just sounded like a fairly ordinary noise-rock band. But sure, we were still young." (Bill)

With the arrival of drummer and Moog-synth fanatic Carl Moller (aka C-man and Planet C), Rake. was complete. As for the choice of moniker, some believe it was a tribute to Don Fleming's Velvet Monkeys, whose third record was in fact titled "Rake". In a 1993 interview, however, the trio claimed that it was Bill who chose the name - he had done the artwork for their first single even before the three of them discovered the existence of the Washington band's record. Still, it's worth pondering the fact that Vincent chose Van Go-Gogh as his "surname", and that the Dutch painter Van Gogh made, between 1883 and 1885, two drawings titled "Man With Rake" and "Silhouette Of A Man With A Rake"...

The cow and the dead fish in the underground marijuana garden

Between 1990 and 1993, three EPs and two cassettes were recorded and released. While already hinting at that drive to rewrite the rulebook, the EPs still move - though with growing conviction - in a borderland between (post-)hardcore violence and relentless "emo". Released in a run of 100 copies by L Records, the 7" Cow Song/My Fish Died is the new creature's first cry. Two tracks taken from the so-called Upland Sessions, with technical supervision by Barret Jones. Referencing the legal troubles of Washington mayor Marion Shepilov Barry (accused of cocaine use and perjury), "Cow Song" is a post-core jolt/scream that drags Fugazi into a deafening psychedelic hurricane, in which one can also make out the slashing guitar outbursts of Dave Rick of the sorely underrated Phantom Tollbooth. Deranged, nihilistic and possessed, "My Fish Died", on the other hand, is a vitriolic slamdance that climbs the ridge of a single hysterical riff.

These two tracks came out of our first real session! That was a period full of 'heavy' solutions. I think there must be at least another 40 minutes of unreleased music out there somewhere... including a great song written by Bill, called 'I'm Fugazi NOW!'. There was a line where he said: 'I play keyboards. And I practice, I practice...', which had me doubled over laughing!

In 1991 came the EP Motorcycle Shoes (on Collision Time Records), pressed on colored vinyl in a run of a thousand copies. Because of the recording technique, the sound became even more chaotic and deafening: all the amps, in fact, were set up facing each other in a tiny room ("no bigger than a bathroom!") with no soundproofing, to the point that you could easily mistake Vincent's guitar for Bill's bass, or vice versa. Dedicated to Rodney King (the Black cab driver beaten bloody by the Los Angeles police on March 3, 1991), the title track probes themes of political power and alienation, dredging up the deformed, "primitivist" claustrophobia of the young Albini in his Big Black incarnation (who, let's remember, recorded his first tracks in a makeshift shack...), but relocating it to a ferocious "alien" dimension (fittingly enough...), amid various samples lifted from makeshift tapes and a drunken speech (there really are some fine people out there!) given by the former president of the prestigious (naturally...) University of Virginia. "That track became our first real trademark. We did several versions of it, each time in a different style." (Vincent).

In "The Center", a hammering, frenzied percussive carpet dominates from start to finish. "My Miserable Existence" and, above all, "Look At Rocks", instead push the Scratch Acid lesson to the point of paroxysm, in a punishing whirlpool of relentless self-flagellation.

The following year came Subterranean Marijuana Garden/U.S. TV (1992), with a less chaotic, sturdier sound. This 7" on clear vinyl, self-released in a run of 600 copies, lays out the obsessive mood of side A, close in spirit to "The Center", and the sobbing feedback of a side B that has clearly digested a fair amount of Jesus Lizard.

But by now the band was determined to tackle a far freer, wilder sound.

Vincent: "Dischord was certainly giving a platform to what was widely regarded as some of the noisiest music around. For us, though, those records were still far too cautious, lacking the chaos we were experimenting with day after day. Those sounds had been codified into a social structure where a genuine counter-culture simply couldn't take root. Maybe they were overbearing and aggressive by their own standards, but we had a different idea of music altogether. There was to be no regard whatsoever for rules and conventions."

And so it was that the Moog synthesizer Carl brought into the fold began to become a fixture of their live shows. The chromatic variations of the instrument, developed in 1963 by the American engineer of the same name, Robert Moog, allowed the band to turn the perception of chaos into a vivid tableau of constant psychic fluctuations. As Bill points out: "The Moog is definitely a mysterious instrument. We had no clear idea how it worked or what sounds it was capable of making. We had a MicroMoog, and it was also in pretty rough shape, so it didn't always work the way it was supposed to - but that was part of the fun!"

Slowly but surely, the trio began exploring a kind of "Moog aesthetic", trying to draw from the instrument those sounds capable of pushing their sound toward dimensions still waiting to be discovered.

Meanwhile, in 1993, came The Day I Remembered Seeing Ice. Assembled by Patrick Foster (singer and guitarist of fellow Virginians Wingtip Sloat) for his Sweet Portable Junket label, this cassette was meant as a kind of "best of" (!) of what the band had produced up to that point in their adventurous live sets (it even includes a cover of Swell Maps' "Vertical Slum"). The audio quality is often questionable, but the anarchic blending of genres makes this scant hour of music an interesting preview of the collage-driven fury of The Tell-Tale Moog. The Moog synthesizer (on this occasion also played by Malcolm Riviera, guitarist of Velvet Monkeys, on tracks such as "Malcojam", "Power Supply", "Malcojam (Conclu)" and "Through Ow Borrow-ing") sneaks in here and there like a razor-sharp blade through the folds of a rickety, lurching sound, and with the first appearance of free-jazz horns, one can already glimpse, albeit still faintly, the intention to follow in the footsteps of some of the sacred monsters of American avant-jazz (Art Ensemble of Chicago and Albert Ayler chief among them).

With the co-pilot, towards the masterpiece

The need for total control over his own music had, in the meantime, led Bill Kellum to launch, in 1991, Vhf Records, destined to become one of the most important and beloved independent labels on the American scene. After reissuing the Motorcycle Shoes Ep (catalogue number 1) and releasing, among others, Eps by Wingtip Sloat and Circle, the band turned to the split 7" Grim Humour Presents… (bundled with issue 3 of the English fanzine of the same name, edited by Richard Johnson) alongside industrial-noisers Con Demek (Rake. contribute the track "Crayon Face"), followed by the cassette Shock Tart Chew Up, which marked the debut behind the drum kit of Vincent, who rebranded himself, for the occasion, as V2G2.

The passion for the genius of Albert Ayler finds an outlet of great creative tension in the enigmatic reinterpretations of "Ghosts", gathered into the four-part suite "Ghosts Of Ghosts". From the saxophone loops which, in their "ambient" circularity (this is where that sense of "infinite dilation" originates, which underpins an emblematic track – as we'll see further on – such as "Quadrablenders"), seem to pay homage to the "solos" of Evan Parker, while immersing themselves in a haze of found voices and assorted concrète sounds ("I"), we move to the more canonically free-jazz structures of "II", right up to the Moog scribbles that face off against industrial scansions in "IV". In these jazz-like compositions, at once dilated and stylized, the bass tries to sound as much like an upright bass as possible, while the drums, favouring the sound of the cymbals, come close, if only obliquely, to the expansive solutions of Sunny Murray.

The extremely long (over thirty-two minutes) "Chair Throwing, History Of, 17th Century, With Tea" (also known by the programmatic title "This Moog’s On Fire") is, instead, a jam dominated by the asymmetrical acrobatics of Moller's synthesizer, which contains in nuce the post-psychedelic/ambient and free-form sound of "Art Ensemble Of Rake".

What was experimented with on "Chair Throwing, History Of, 17th Century, With Tea" found its first official recognition with the release of the Lp Rake Is My Co-Pilot (1994; 2 tracks, 45:02) (the title is a pun referencing God Is My Co-Pilot), for the recording of which "very long jams were needed out in Herndon. That was the only period in which the band truly became an active project, with regular rehearsals and a relaxed atmosphere" (Vincent). One of these jams saw Carl (on sax and drums) and Vincent (guitar and vocals) going at it hammer and tongs, aided by the synths and drum machine of Malcolm Riviera and by a certain Johnny N. Goode grappling with an assortment of gear. The jam (available, under the name Fang Bart Board, streaming on www.oastem.com, a site run by Vincent himself that collects a wealth of unreleased material) shows just how far their improvisations had pushed, by that point, towards total freedom. Artistic merit aside (alongside some relatively interesting moments, there are others that are certainly harmless or, at best, ambiguous), Megaphone (as this long improvisation, divided into three parts, has been renamed) opens a window onto the three musicians' "perpetual" workshop. A workshop where explorations of the Moog universe (listen, in this regard, to "Part 3"…) went hand in hand with the broadening of their experimental horizons.

In the end, two long improvisations for guitar, sax, clarinet, double drums (with reinforcement from Fred R. Groth), bass and Moog were chosen for Rake Is My Co-Pilot, which, besides probing possible spacedelic and impro-noise grafts onto a free-jazz body, brushing, in some cases, against pure sonic abstraction ("The Thin Herd"), also manage to retain a strongly rock appeal, despite the irreverent synth trajectories and chaotic horn barricades (see the extended version of "Motorcycle Shoes", the creative peak of this first phase alongside "Ghosts Of Ghosts").

Even if still, in some ways, raw and timid in pressing the accelerator towards structural disintegration, this record represents the dress rehearsal before the great leap towards the band's absolute masterpiece.

"Jesus, what the fuck happened to this generation?"

Heralded by the single Squelch/Phrase Text Slur (released on Fourth Dimension Records), the monumental (in every sense…) double album The Art Ensemble Of Rake/The Tell-Tale Moog (81 tracks; 139:08) was put out by Vhf in 1995.

"Most of the more experimental material recorded up to that point ended up on the first record, Art Ensemble Of Rake, recorded after numerous rehearsals at the Herndon Rec Center, the building next to the public pool where Planet C lived. It was 1994. Around that time, we dropped the idea of writing songs and became a free-form band. The Rec Center was a big space and all we did was wander around, smashing chairs and whatever else was lying around to make noise. Then we started inviting people to play with us. Once, a guy wandered by mistake into the room where we were playing and exclaimed: 'Jesus, what the fuck happened to this generation?'" (Bill).

Vincent echoes him: "We put a lot of energy into assembling the record. It might be hard to believe, but there were some pretty heated debates about how we should sequence the tracks, one after another."

The choice of title, besides paying homage to Edgar Allan Poe's short story collection ("The Tell-Tale Heart"), is also a pun that invokes the collective Art Ensemble Of Chicago, one of the trio's declared influences, failing to mention which would be a crime, as well as incredibly misleading.

"Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Sun Ra, Faust and Frank Zappa are all artists who, in one way or another, had their impact on the making of the record," Vincent recalls. By cross-breeding, then, the explosive force of free-jazz with the analogue, visionary power of the Moog, Rake. wrote, with this double album, one of the most iconoclastic, indecipherable and rollicking chapters in the history of rock.

"You're right: it is an indecipherable record," Vincent continues. "It was definitely a watershed for us, in the sense that, finally, there was all the space we needed to say what we wanted to say, to finally be free. And the duality you rightly pointed out also concerned our relationship with the music we loved at the time: a music analysed and deconstructed in a particular way, less obvious than it might seem today [especially after the many wild escapades of America's noisiest and weirdest scene over the last decade!, ed.]. The two records, moreover, complete one another, but in a way that's, let's say, 'abstract'. Both cast a very deep gaze on the band's complex identity. That's why they're so problematic and conflicted, as well as brimming with tremendous energy that tries to stitch together these wounds, these worlds."

Indeed, Rake.'s music is one made of tensions that are at times unbearable, where the oppositions between seemingly irreconcilable elements resolve into a sonic stream of consciousness dominated by a singular post- approach: "Some people, at the time, viewed our moves as akin to a 'punk' gesture: in other words, we were seen as the ones who would go on to further smash certain clichés, pushing things who knows where… But the fact is we were never punks! We were lone wolves, hippies, freaks playing music that, in some way, stood in opposition to punk, but by way of a reworking of what Sun Ra, Henry Cow and many krautrockers had done."

The four continually shifting, magmatic, asymmetrical textures on the first disc are counterbalanced, on the second, by 75 (!) one-minute fragments that follow one another without a break, in an applied delirium of destruction. It's the wonder of chaos: its hallucinated poetry. But for Bill it was also, and perhaps above all, a way of reminding himself that playing is first and foremost about having fun.

“I can't deny that our music had a significant 'arty' dimension, but, at least as far as I'm concerned, I was never able to attach much importance to it. And that's because, even today, I can't shake the view that most of the music we recorded was born essentially out of the desire to have 'fun'. On top of that, I never actually played my main instrument (since V was already playing guitar), and I rarely worried much about the overall shape of our sound. Still, even though we were at the mercy of Vincent and Carl's decisions (they were, in the end, responsible for most of the music), in the end only the things we all completely agreed on ever got recorded.”

Remote perception and the quadraphonic blender

Art-rock and the desire to have fun: if this is indeed the pairing that holds the key to understanding the music of Rake., then it's no coincidence that "Art Ensemble Of Rake" opens and closes with the Mario Bros theme: pure 16-bit music that, at the start, serves as a prelude to the insistent, minimalistic ringing out of a single guitar note. It's the introduction to "Klang Co." (19.55), recorded live in Richmond, during "a thrilling show alongside Harry Pussy, Labradford, Charalambides and Spatula" (Vincent). An incredible, enormous black hole of spatial free-jazz noise, at the mercy of darting horns (stretched into multiphonic clusters) that suddenly distill shifting panoramas of velvety dreaminess, blunt metallic cadences, disorderly and explosive drumming (on drums are Casa G. – already heard on Motorcycle Shoes and Cow Song/My Fish Died – and Fred R. Groth), clots of Moog (with Rahsaan Rob Wynn lending Carl a hand) and a subterranean continuum of subliminal sonic friction.

The impression is one of witnessing the slow decoding of a ragged lyricism, within the circle of a ritualism degenerated into system, right up to the very long coda where, like ghosts, there wander looping guitar whirlpools, guitar flubs (part Derek Bailey, part Henry Kaiser), biblical dawns, interstellar cracks and voices that, moving fearfully beyond the sleepwalking bloom of a disjointed alienation – like "a murmuring of dead souls at the edge of a dream," to borrow DeLillo's words (1) – seem to summon the memory of Robert Ashley's "Automatic Writing" (1978). What in Rake Is My Co-Pilot was still approximation and "experiment" becomes, in "Klang Co.", thanks to a more fully realized proliferation of detail and an extremely sophisticated handling of the "telepathic" interplay between instruments, a clear and unmistakable sign of the path the band has decided to take.

And yet, the barriers of convention have not been entirely torn down just yet.

When the bloodcurdling scream that opens the iridescent, deformed furnace of "Remote Sensing" (12.33) suddenly strikes, the final step is taken. As the fury gradually subsides, the landscape traces the boundaries of a free-form symphony of electric/electronic sludge that lurches forward incoherently, as if it were a multi-handed session of automatic writing (not at all surrealist, but furiously expressionist). The concept of structure is something incomprehensible to musicians who, like these, feel their way blindly through the tunnel of the unknown. Post-atomic free-form music that transplants the "sentimental journey" of Pere Ubu's modern dance into the radioactive cobwebs of instruments/machines that broadcast psychological acts in the form of sonic shards ("In the end, what's influenced us most is our unconscious, both individual and collective..." – Carl).

A hallucinated soundscape of feedback, dissonance, guitar wreckage (worth noting the presence of Justin Chearno of Pitchblende and Doldrums, the latter a band that – with Kellum himself on keyboards – will go on to develop some of the ideas found here) that keeps worshipping the "corpse" of Fred Frith, piercing screams, clarinets chirping amid "mental" deserts and glacial claustrophobia: where the idea of fun has gone off to, nobody dares ask. Probably, it's been swallowed whole by hordes of Martians blasting this music in their factory-issue spaceships...

"Helio Moog" (23.52), for its part, by sharpening the underground ties between psychedelia and industrial, represents the most extreme "gestural" statement (as an attempt at psychic-sonic purism) in Rake.'s music. A track, in short, that shows how industrial music is nothing more than the endpoint of psychedelia's noisiest and most speculative tradition (in this sense, one should trace it back at least as far as Red Crayola's "Parable Of Arable Land", in the year of grace 1967). No longer, then, music for the revelation of the human soul ("psyche-delein"), but music meant to illuminate the paranoia and anguish that mankind projects onto the world around it, through an exhausting back-and-forth of "horror and euphoria", the very dyad in which Ekkehard Jost captured the whole meaning of Albert Ayler's possessed sound.

Amid the incandescent tongues of a noisy whirlpool, a neurotic conclave of horns is cradled by the understated interplay of bass and drums, the one solid center of gravity (?) in this delirious descent into the horrifying underworld of a free-rock rarely so subversive and merciless. Against the extraterrestrial pulses of the electronics stand periodic maximalist buildups, but the music pushes all the way to the brink of total autism, with the instruments seeming, rather than assembling musical scores, more interested in carelessly stitching together a dialogue of the deaf.

As the record gradually gives up its secrets, the bond linking these thoroughly out-of-step freaks to the most famous "tribe" in avant-garde jazz becomes clear: the Art Ensemble Of Chicago. Even though the horns get their fair share of space, it's the Moog – as we now know – that continuously unleashes, with a chilling, desecrating charge, the expressive force of their improvisations. In this sense, then, Art Ensemble Of Rake can be read as a re-encoding of the Chicago collective's sound, in which the reckless reeds of Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie and Joseph Jarman are "replaced" by the unstable arcs of the analog synthesizer, while the guitar endlessly interrogates itself, searching for a sound capable of ensnaring the poetry of error. A poetry that never stops being, too, a gateway into the labyrinthine oscillations of the spirit: "I love the roar of amplifiers and the way it manages to pass right through the skin. I feel a kind of existential energy when I let my guitar collide head-on with the amp. We certainly don't make music to win friends. We chose the 'wrong music'." (Vincent). "Wrong" and terribly erratic, I'd add, if only for the way it builds bridges, however indirect, toward experiences distant in time.

The spotlight thus falls once again on the sonic research, balanced between live electronics and free jazz, that Paul Bley and Annette Peacock carried out in the early Seventies on essential records such as "Improvisie" and "Dual Unity". On the title track of the former, for instance, the angular, atonal interactions of the Bley/Peacock duo's synthesizers built shifting structures of shattered emotion, while Han Bennink's drums decorated the surrounding space, airy and dyslexic. An exploration of the sonic vortices and voids of space and silence (the "dual unity") that Rake. would push to the madhouse twenty-four years later. Some unreleased recordings (some with reduced or expanded lineups) seem to underline exactly this "line of descent". For example, At War With Jazz (recorded in Arlington on March 16, 1996, with Cman on sax, a certain Roberto on Moog and OASTEM! Jim on drums) continues to highlight the closeness to the Bley duo's sonic experiments.

But, of course, one could go back even further, dusting off the adventures of the ensemble Musica Electronic Viva, whose sonic sculptures owed much of their amorphous fascination to the sound of Richard Teitelbaum's Moog, who would later get involved in free jazz circles with Anthony Braxton.

And what about the radical material accumulations of AMM? Or the hysterical oscillations of Conrad Schnitzler's "Rot"? Or the ultra-cacophonous barbarism of Borbetomagus? In short, a tradition of outsiders that keeps up its sinister path of demolition, and which, at its most disintegrated moments, already points toward the most spastic and libertarian routes of the new American free-noise, starting with the monstrous aberrations of Temple Of Bon Matin on that epic pandemonium known as "Bullet Into Mesmer's Brain" (1997).

The "wrong music", precisely. And, as the fire flickers, "Quadrablenders" closes with a leap into cosmic emptiness: depths amplified beyond measure, imperceptible creaks, enigmatic rumblings and the yawns of a clarinet left to its own devices, on the verge of suicide.

In the relentless fading of sound, even silence gets scraped against the walls of absence.

“Lookout, rattlesnakes!”

“The Tell-Tale Moog started out as a collage of cassettes recorded during rehearsals. There was a bit of everything on those tapes: aborted trips, attempts at writing "rock" songs, oddball instrumental pieces, found sounds, voices, tunings, etc. A real Babel of good things and "terrible" moments. We were completely at odds about what to choose for the record, so we ended up listening to a mountain of material. In the end, we decided on a strategy: each of us would assemble the record however we saw fit. Whoever's version was most convincing would be chosen". (Bill)

“I decided to put together a summary tape of all those reels – a tape loosely centered around the track 'Vitamin-9' (a bored jazz-blues number that suddenly snaps like a wild animal..., ed.). It ran forty minutes and was full of sound effects. I don't remember, though, how we ended up concluding we should make a CD made entirely of 60-second tracks, but I know for a fact it amused us enormously, almost like it was a mockery of the CD format. The plant that was supposed to press the record rejected the original master, saying it was clearly badly recorded and that they wouldn't press it. So Rex sent it back, with a note arguing that the only thing they should be worrying about was the money they'd already been paid". (Vincent)

The miniaturist delirium of "The Tell-Tale Moog", besides representing a reversal of the expansive perspectives of Art Ensemble Of Rake, rightfully enters the pantheon of miniaturization applied to rock, even though, in more than one case, the tracks are simply split across multiple pieces, almost forming micro-suites in which, regardless, the 60-second limit doesn't necessarily halt the tracks' "perpetual" development. So while they employ one of the quintessential anti-progressive techniques, Rake., in turn, seize upon, with parodic intent, the musical form (the suite) most widely used within that very tradition. The postmodern pastiche of The Tell-Tale Moog is, however, far removed from the "progressive" experiments of labels like SST, say, precisely because almost all of those very experiences are here swept away by an utterly anarchic modus operandi, capable of dismembering their intentions and results in a hall-of-mirrors game that, rather than synthesizing them, ends up surpassing them, heading toward some of the most subversive acts in the history of rock.

Seventy-five tracks that run from the frequency experiments of "1" all the way to the digital harsh-noise-smeared computer music of track 72-75. In between lies the absolute kingdom of Dada, the triumph of expressive freedom, the destruction and regeneration of rock, its funeral and its ascension to heaven. Fun and fury. Spazz-core that mutates into hallucinated acid-emo ranting (2-6 and the reprises of 8-9); rattlesnakes, mesmeric feedback flutters, lo-fi noise-rock that sanctifies excess and skids terrifyingly before letting itself be poisoned by electrostatic profanities in which electricity sets the air ablaze to the point of blaspheming the very idea of the divine (10-17); the schizophrenic guitar-drums duet and the Moog in the hands of a homicidal madman who, having glimpsed the beauty of the cosmos, tries at all costs to send intergalactic messages before they come to take him away ("Speaker Phasing Test" + "Tell-Tale Moog"); the cut-rate country-blues of "V-9/Weird Bus Stop Man" and the glitched-out videogame of "Witch's Brew", where the bad guys have gotten sick of waiting for the good guys to make a move and go on a rampage. And then they go off drinking right in their faces alongside hookers picked up off the ring road. Easier to listen to than to describe, believe me...

"Bass Flap By Rex" and "Monks Vs. Nunns" form a diptych of bristling post-punk frenzy, while, if from "Temporal Clutch" through to "Sovtek vs. Gretch" we witness yet another dramatic, emotional ramping-up of post-core, with Vincent on the verge of vocal collapse (truly mind-bending stuff...), with the triptych "Tell Tale Moog/Charlie Wilkens/BANISH THE SCEPTRE!" the distortions swell into a fluorescent, apocalyptic storm surge, with distant bells tolling for the dead. Moving on through spatial panoramas, caustic garage-rock that zips through myriad asteroids, cut short by haughty prog-metal interludes (!) and flowing into a sequence of extraterrestrial impulses, mangled strings in the half-light, punk ambushes, the band steers the monster-mosaic toward the definitive climax of its gargantuan exaltation. Set up by the possessed art-noise ralenti of 49-52, the glorious odyssey of 53-75 soars on the wings of a majestic space-rock, up to its slow, merciless disintegration amid webs of acid-etched guitar improvisation, sci-fi elegies, lysergic modulations/emanations, drills, warped voices, blues as funeral marches, vox-pop sound bites and Mario Bros chased down and torn to pieces by the princess... In a word: f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c!

Crowning it all, a year later comes Art Ensemble Of Rake (Carlophonics)/The Tell-Tale Moog (Carlophonics), namely the double album's two hours and twenty minutes condensed by Carl Moller into a ten-minute-and-forty-four-second (!) 7" vinyl. Filed under: genius (again) at work...

"A lot of people told us that listening to the whole record often gave them a hard time. So Carl took the tapes and tore them apart on his computer, condensing the whole thing into just ten minutes and forty-five seconds..." (Vincent).

Improvisations, secret agents and supergroups (or alleged ones...)

Improvisations For Modern Dance was supposed to be released in 1996 by Fourt Dimension Records, but after completing both the master and the artwork, nothing came of it. Now available digitally on www.oastem.com, the record features two rather ambitious compositions: "F and C Substitution Set [edit]", built from scattered noise-ridden accumulations sucked into the Moog's numbing vortex, and "Haslo Navigation Series", which instead wanders down a bizarre free-jazz/folk path with no clear destination in mind.

Also in 1996, the band joined forces with Pelt (and other occasional musicians) to create the project United Supreme Council, namely Rex (bass, percussion), V2G2 (acoustic guitar, delay crunch loop, percussion, clarinet, voice), CC (drums, sax, Moog), Patrick Best (bowed cymbals, bass resonator, conga), Jack Rose (bowed cymbal, guitar), Mike Gangloff (guitar, shenai, beat frequency oscillator), Mick Simmons (goblet drum, djembes) and Beth Jones (dumbeks, djembes). Of the various shows by this sort of supergroup, what has come down to us is Oastem! Vibe Orchestra (released only in 2001 by Eclipse Records), which collects two lengthy improvisations (recorded in April '97 at Tommy's in Richmond) torn between raga-rock delirium, circular percussiveness, free-jazz and Moog gone walkabout. For completists only.

But it's now time for the third official record. Released by Squealer Record (which had initially considered a simple 7"), G-Man (also known as Intelligence Agent # 2003 or Special Agent: Rake, and conceived as a concept album devoted to the imaginary special agent Jack Kurtz) tries to structure, as much as possible, the radiant chaos of the previous, mammoth double album. Mediating, then, between schizoid impro-skronk, dissertations suspended between pungent lysergic fumes, torn echoes of math-rock and noise abominations born of the Land of the Rising Sun, the trio (who, in the meantime, had decided to adopt new identities, respectively: Dr. Rex Rx, Cryptographic C dbl C and Vincent Van No No Go) craft a fusion of styles and genres that once again leaves you baffled by the subversive charge with which these elements are blended, as if striving to forge a thoroughly personal anti-music. After the studio divertissement of "10,000KILLAHUTRZ tone", "PunkRock Glo" takes off like a rocket before decomposing into the usual electroacoustic sludge, duly scraped out inside a foundry run by spastic amoebas and set adrift in the long galactic sabbath of "Chair Throwing Incident" (in memory of the many chairs smashed at the Rec Center), a merciless fresco of abstract expressionism poised between Merzbow, the ferocity of an Ayler even more possessed than usual, and the sidereal depths of Tangerine Dream.

Amid the spectral tones of "B.D.B.", an evil scream clears the way for a liberating noise-psychedelic jam. It's true, they were never punks. And yet the destructive wickedness and the all-out exaltation of these tracks are children of that same rebellious spirit. "Postscript.drv" then unleashes Boredoms-style aggression with a stoner tinge, before descending the slope of ecstatic improvisations that ferry the black star of the Grateful Dead toward strange progressive-math/noise constellations. After "Filter Touch", "Andy Bass" (a sleepwalking lo-fi chant) and "Chesterfield Nights" (a filthy garage-noise piece), the closing stretch boasts the stately march of "Eric Blood Axe Rules OK".

To document their live performances once again, in 1997 the double album Fighting Two Quarters And A Nickel (145:54) was released, containing a series of recordings made over the span of four years. "We didn't play live very often, and rarely with the same lineup from one show to the next," Bill recalls. "More often than not, we tried to 'connect' the music to the surrounding space: if we were playing a club, we'd decide to crank the amps up full blast; if instead we found ourselves in very large spaces, we'd go for more ambient sounds. Overall, I think a lot of our shows weren't anything special, but we often hit upon those five minutes where things really clicked. We always tried to make each of our shows different from the last, and that often meant failure. Some of our best shows were with an expanded lineup, for instance playing with Pelt or with Treiops Treyfid of Pitchblende. Or again, when we took the stage billed as the 'Art Ensemble' with Casa G. and Rahsaan Rob Wynn. We usually recorded our performances on cassette, but that didn't happen for some of our most memorable moments, like the first time we played at CBGB's, or that other time we crossed instruments together with Sonic Youth. As for 'Fighting Two Quarters...', I think of it more as a documentary, a catalog of approaches and sounds rather than a proper live album, if you know what I mean".

With a cover that openly references Heavy Organ by organist Virgil Fox (who, between 1971 and 1975, produced effervescent Bach-ian reworkings), this double cd-r is essential to understanding what the band was capable of live. More delirious and aleatory than the second disc, the first is a sonic trip to listen to with eyes closed. "Black Cat, Washington, DC 9.7.95" (one of their masterpieces) is a sprawling improvisation straddling free-jazz, surrealist kraut-rock (Faust lurking just around the corner), acid-rock excursions (the "black star" of Jerry Garcia & co. once again), noise radicalism and echoes of world-music. It's music that, while delighting in losing itself among sinister, even unsettling sonic imagery - with the moog ferrying everything into the hyperspace of imagination ("Duke University Coffeehouse, Durham, NC 2.3.95", the "concretist" magnetism of "9:30 Club, Washington, DC 8.23.94") - still manages to launch into fiery crescendos reminiscent of the most blazing space-rock, or dissolve into gaseous, amorphous swoons with sax rust that recalls "do you remember Roscoe Mitchell's 'Nonaah'?" and certain tortuous Crawlspace-like parabolas lurking deep down ("9:30 Club, Washington, DC 8.4.95"). Closing things out is a take captured in Richmond, at the Hole In The Wall, on April 27, '96: a crepuscular clearing where the instruments encrypt messages of pure alienation. And to think that on one of these evenings, they opened for Gumball, terrifying the poor souls who'd shown up to sing along at the top of their lungs with Don Fleming!

The second disc is far more introverted and erratic (at times, it sounds like an anticipation of the most enigmatic Temple Of Bon Matin) and revolves around collective improvisations that develop out of "Klang Co." ("Klang Festival, Richmond, VA 7.30.94"). What follows, then, are the abstractions of "Here Art Gallery, New York, NY 1.10.93", "Northern Virginia Community College Mail Art Show, Annandale, VA 12.4.95" and "Duke University Coffeehouse, Durham, NC 2.3.95 [3]", the astral jazz-rock of "Black Cat, Washington, DC 1.10.94", while "9:30 Club, Washington, DC 5.27.94" even nods to the most "harmolodic" Saccharine Trust. As if to symbolize a genuine evolutionary path, this second part arrives at the expansive, droning sonorities of "Tommy's Warehouse, Richmond, VA 4.12.97" which, starting out from "Quadrablenders", flows, ideally, straight into Resume The Cosmos territory, before exploding without reservation into "9:30 Club, Washington, DC 8.4.95 / Margaret's Café, Chapel Hill, NC 3.9.93".

With Resume The Cosmos (released in 1998 by Australia's Camera Obscura), the band moves decisively closer to the Sun Ra Arkestra experience. "At certain moments, Sun Ra's music always seemed on the verge of disappearing. He was completely in love with space, so we too tried to record music that was truly 'cosmic'. It wasn't a real tribute as such, although, with hindsight, it certainly seems like one. There was a first session that didn't quite come together, where each of us played our own instrument. Afterwards, we decided to try out instruments we had little experience with. SKB played the space bass and cymbals. I don't remember everything I played, but I definitely had a go at clarinet. Cman, on the other hand, played sax plus various drums or things like that. We recorded the whole album in a pretty decent recording studio that we snuck into, popping the door open with a simple bottle cap... Sessions would usually wrap up around two in the morning. One way or another, we managed with all that gear, even though there was a lot of alcohol flowing. Then, one night, the police showed up with guns drawn and we hit the floor, defending ourselves with our instruments. They asked for our names and everything got sorted out. Right then and there, we decided we'd had enough, and once the final mix of the record was done (Carl handled that!), we left the studio for good."

A patchy record, even chaotic at times (and, in any case, incomplete given the conditions it was born out of), Resume The Cosmos nonetheless had the merit of laying bare, without compromise, the trio's most jazz-oriented and esoteric side. After an inconclusive back-and-forth between sax and clarinet ("Untitled 1"), the record plunges into a cosmic abyss, where tropical percussion and assorted ritualistic vocalizations sketch out a shamanic trance, right up to the grating para-industrial machinations of the coda. The glorious AACM tradition (2), meanwhile, makes itself felt in the reed mumblings of "Untitled 3", while the hypnotic backdrop (with its solemn, ecstatic stretching-out) harks back to "Quadrablenders" (a genuine touchstone for their sonic imagination). Then, growing ever more abstract, "Untitled 4" splits the difference between Evan Parker and Braxton's "3 Compositions Of New Jazz". Closing things out is a recitation of "I Am The Cosmos", a short poem accompanied by a mournful sax solo.

In 2002 came the cd-r Ginseng Nights. Billed as a "heavy rock" record, this double album (according to Bill, even one of their finest moments!) was recorded on a portable DAT recorder in the autumn of '96 and shows a lineup whose spirit harks back to their origins. "We'd rented a space at Barco Rebar, and in that area there was a rehearsal space where a lot of metal and grunge bands used to practice. So there were plenty of amps around. The power of the Ampeg SVT's and the Mesa 4x12's convinced us to set the saxes and the moog aside for a while and crank up the volume! So we decided to play some ferocious rock, albeit with a free spirit" (Vincent).

Extended compositions such as "Black Crowes" and "Love Rock" accordingly feature plenty of free improvisation. "Classic Rock Improvisors", meanwhile, can't decide between Jimi Hendrix and Hawkwind. The second disc, finally, boasts a long krautedelic ride that sinks into yet another free-form delirium.

Also in 2002, Vhf released Omniverse .:. Frequency, a single extended composition running over forty-one minutes, drawn from recordings made a couple of years earlier. With this rarefied work, far more experimental than its predecessor, the trio attempt, to paraphrase what Vincent writes in the liner notes, to broaden the perception of sound. Hence contact mics scattered everywhere, "minimal" sounds, shadowy drones, raga echoes, second-hand electroacoustics, etc. The results, however, are decidedly divisive.

Meanwhile, on the website www.oastem.com, Vincent keeps making available some unreleased recordings. Cans, dated 2001, further widens the scope of their research, offering blends of guitar-drone, frippertronics and musique concrète ("Untitled 1"), couplings of Nmperign and Loren Mazzacane Connors ("Untitled 2"), a Resume The Cosmos teleported to the era of Rake Is My Co-Pilot ("Untitled 3"), and regurgitations of avant-jazz radicalism ("Untitled 4", "Untitled 5"). Vincent's guitar experimentation, after all, has deep roots, in some cases predating the Rake experience itself.

In any case, it's worth tracking down Water Intake Manual, a long free-form take from '92 that, in its saturation and distortion, could be mistaken for Skullflower material; or Omni Jules, indebted to solo Robert Fripp; or, finally, Back Beat Vinnie, a dark, murky, surrealist soundscape. Also from 2001, Stones For Eleven continues, on one half, to probe the stretched-out spaces of the cosmos ("1"), while on the other it once again leans on the "infinite" palette of the Moog ("Nightfall Now Demanded A Reply").

From 2004, meanwhile, come The Can Session (SKB on acoustic guitar, Cman on horns and shop vacs, and V on eWah, eWah groovin') with an extremely relaxed, almost soporific mood, and Smoking Screens, which focuses on acoustic guitar, synth modulations and exotic instruments.

2005, on the other hand, is when the recordings gathered under the name The Unified Patchchord Theory were made, moving between world-music, avant-jazz and cosmic sounds ("Patch 2"), as were those of the intriguing Striking The Archer, whose abstract scores (ever more cryptic Moog nebulae, robotic voices, hypnotic developments, tribalism arm in arm with acid guitar improvisations) surprisingly recall the most unhinged, creative moments of the mid-Nineties.

In any case, aside from these sporadic jams, the band has officially been on hiatus since 2002 and, although there's talk of a new two-man project between Bill and Vincent (the chosen moniker is said to be Sunwards), it seems the Rake. name is destined to remain in the shadows. Meanwhile, while Bill - having wound up the Doldrums adventure in 2000 - continues to work in music through his label Vhf, Carl, after living in New Orleans until the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, relocated to Tennessee, where he became a cameraman for a wrestling league. The only one who has kept playing consistently is Vincent. First with the avant-folk project From Quagmire (seek out Habitats In The Wound from 2005), then, after moving to Philadelphia, in the ranks of Fern Knight and the multimedia collective The Valerie Project. As for the new project with Bill (Sunwards), word on the street confirms work is underway.

Meanwhile, on the usual website, you can listen to a handful of sessions, all dating from 2005: "Time To Barter With The Tortoise", "In Leigion With Leaves", "Listening Like Chairs", "Ask Among The Discontinued", "Ritual And Corporeality", "Flourecence In Flight", "Duck vs Goose" and "Riding With The Crow".

The author would like to thank the members of the band for their willingness to engage in long online conversations.

(30/01/2011)

Notes:

1) Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

2) Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians

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